Back when we had 13 channels, Mom used to say: "Don't sit so close,you'll ruin your eyes." I wonder what she'd say about the Internet...

Thursday, August 02, 2007

Bursting Bubble 2.0: Who's got it right?

(I'm on a tech kick this week...so bear with me....) John Dvorak has a fascinating kvetch about "bubble 2.0" and when the bottom will all fall out of all the "web 2.0" feel-goodness that bathes every hot young developer in the Silicon Valley. Some of the stuff that's floating the bubble (in John's view) and will eventually burst are: neo-networking (too much social networking), video mania, user generated content, mobile everything, ad-leveraged search, and widgets and toolbars.....(Fred Wilson's less cranky but still cautious

yep. pretty much everything that everyone's screaming about that constitutes an AMAZINGNEWPRODUCT!

Marshall Kirkpatrick (yes, we all know he's a very smart young man) thinks John's a cranky and wrong old coot. "Ubiquitous broadband and the clear utility of the Internet is changing the world and all our lives." sez Marshall. Yes, I'd like to introduce him to some of the more remote regions of rural New England, where the ubiquity of broadband is a dubious concept...."Millions of people are using MySpace and YouTube and they are never going back" that is, until they grow up, get bored, or are denied employment because of those ancient pics of a frat-house beer bust or wet t-shirt contest...

Okay...so here's what a high-level, early adopter, who is not filtering social media/web 2.0 thru the eyes of her teen-agers (I don't have them--have to do it myself) thinks of the Curmudgeon and the Kid--Curmudgeon's right on some level. I'm not sure how much of a "bubble" there is, as there seems to be a lot of developing going on, but a lot of the developers not necessarily quitting their day jobs and selling stock options out of the box. So, maybe there's a bit of safety there--as to when it all bursts, people won't all be out of jobs. We'll just see a lot of abandoned social networks--similar to place holders but just a bit sadder....

and the two biggest bottom-outs: social networking sites and widgets and toolbars. From a user perspective: if I put one more toolbar on my toolbar I won't have much of a browser window to view any content that might be marked by the features in said toolbar. And have you ever seen duelling toolbars? as in one toolbar cancelling out another toolbar, or the security of one toolbar monkeying with the other one hundred or so security features of other features? It's simply a waste of time to install and delete all these different toolbars that, more often than not, have come from (you guessed it) social networking applications....

Speaking of which, I'm receiving regular email invites from new and struggling social networking sites on a daily basis--sometimes one, sometimes two or more. I seem to be a pretty popular kid--and have even received post-email phone calls designed to help me negotiate or set up my account on a particular social networking site. Yes, I joined Facebook after being bothered by three of my friends. And only did it because I got bugged by three friends AND saw some possible employment benefits to it (a la LinkedIn.) As for "friends": on Facebook, I have a number of friends I've met IRL. On the other sites? Well, it's kind of dubious as to who my "friends" really are (esp. when the guy who developed whatever it is, whom I've never met, is immediately my "friend". Dude, I don't even know you!) Jemima Kiss (one of my friends--and on Facebook) recently wrote about receiving an email that notified her that she was already signed up for a particular "reputation ranking" site (another kind of soc. networking site.) The developers went and did it *for* her. argh! And I signed up for something called Doostang because I got an invite from someone--and the criteria to be a fully-vested part of Doostang is to invite (read:spam) a bunch of other people that I know! argh!

As for widgets: well, if they're all web-based, and we all don't have all that extra-flowing goodness of (not)ubiquitous broadband, lots of sites will slow down. And once widgets get regular advertising, they're going to be ripe for sploggers. We won't see "citizen syndicators" as TACODA's Dave Morgan said in a piece at MediaPost--because "citizens" aren't really going to care. Dave, and many others, seem to think that when people read personal blogs, they really want all sorts of stuff to let people know what they're reading/doing/what the weather is in Kuala Lampour...but the thing is, when people read personal blogs, they're reading for what the person is saying about her life, not necessarily what she's doing in her spare time (this is esp. true with mommybloggers--who often have high traffic and low Google Page Rank--where most of the readers assume the mommy is doing lots of things non-web related when she's not online and really aren't all that concerned with the sidebars.) The only "citizen syndicators" we'll see are sploggers with huge bandwidth who will be able to load up their splogs with all kinds of widgets along with their ads....

So, yes there's a bubble going on--and it's being manufactured in the great bubble maker/hype market of Silicon Valley, without much of an understanding of how folks outside of urban and well-wired regions of the U.S. use the Internet. It's growing in part due to hype without much of an understanding of how much time people have to spend social networking and reputation building and marking things from their toolbars and tweeting each other. And, we don't know what's going to happen when the hyperactive high school and college age folks finally go to work, get married, throw baby showers, have kids, and join bowling leagues (yes, they still do that here.) That part of the equation has yet to be tested. There are many assumptions based on the habits of young well-connecteds like Marshall, but those folks may be the exception and not the norm.

Worse yet, we don't know how much time it will take to adequately connect rural (and some poor urban) regions that are still on dial-up. My sense is that it will take government intervention to compel the various companies that controll the parsing out of broadband infrastructure to fully wire the U.S. (something like the Tennessee Valley Authority.) But at this point, that's still a dream...

Bubble on, Silicon Valley...bubble on....

Upate: Webomatica talks about thefinancial consequences of Web 2.0 much more succinctly than I do: namely the money in it is VC money, not your parent's money. So, those who may get burned won't lose life-savings. There's much more there, so read the post.